Thread: DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY: A COMPLETE FRAUD

DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY: A COMPLETE FRAUD
By Frosty Wooldridge
April 14, 2008
NewsWithViews.com

While bombing Iraq and Afghanistan in the name of the “War on Terror,â€

Duplicate Post

http://www.alipac.us/ftopicp-664843-.html#664843

Well, the great Frosty Wooldridge! Afghanistan and Iraq have both posed thorny foreign policy questions and I have never really seen an answer to a reasonable alternative to Bush's policy--apart from doing nothing---, but I have always had one. The drawback, though, is that this answer tends to rankle the numerous critics of the UN, who think that we should have nothing to do with that organization, at all. To those people I would say "Do you think that the United States of America cannot exercise defacto control over a 98 lb weakling like the United Nations? What means other than words and a few wealthy financial backers do they have to resist a powerful entity like the US?"

Exactly one year before 9/11 I attended a conference hosted by the UN in New York and comprised of a core group of Nobel Peace Prize winners. Rubbing shoulders with actual high level UN officials I shed a part of the dim view that many conservatives have held. So what could we have done differently with respect to the Iraq? Here is a short answer:

Use the UN as a substitute or surrogate force for direct American intervention with American financial assistance.

In Iraq there was already a successful weapons inspection program, that had previously been led by USMC officer, Scott Ritter. It had made outstanding progress with no bombing nor loss of life by its own personnel. The next step would have been to conduct investigations of human rights violations under some international auspices. But not only was Saddam Hussein and his crew causing a lot of destruction and suffering--the sanctions levied to bring him down were causing a lot of suffering to the Iraqi people. Again funding an increased force for this purpose would have cost something. But not nearly what we have spent. And the UN nations have plenty of manpower they are willing to contribute.

Afghanistan is a different story and it is handled by NATO. I think Western countries need to walk a delicate balance; not introducing corrupt Western practices that anger some religious zealots; stopping the export of drugs but providing economic alternatives; setting up controlled borders to prevent terrorist incursion but not affronting traditional cultures.

I do agree that securing our borders would be a more appropriate expenditure than what our miltary adventures have proven to be. I just have never seen any realistic alternatives advanced by critics of Bush, Cheney and Rice.

Wasn't it bureaucrats within the U.N. that allowed Sadam to circumvent the sanctions of the Oil for Food Program? In other words, U.N. corruption kept Sadam: healty, wealthy, wise and rich. I'd imagine corruption is so embedded within the U.N. any sanction program undertaken is totally undercut.

There's a lot of corruption in the UN. I didn't say I came out with stars in my eyes. And UN peacekeepers or other international monitoring groups, like AFrican Union, commit their own vicious crimes, too.

But putting the US into Iraq, IMO, has been a powerful magnet to draw jihadists to that region, just as the Russian military did in AF. Financially backing a squadron (best word I can think of) of Third World recruits would have cost what? $50 billion? We will spend fifty times that much in Iraq, easily. Plus we are getting Americans and Iraqis killed. I wouldn't doubt there would be deadly violence with an international group, but I think much less.

The bigger question would be: having used UN troops as proxies would we feel it necessary to acquiesce to more global governance. I think not.